Joy For Beginners (16 page)

An hour or so later Hadley woke to the sound of the gate opening. Sara stood there, smiling.

“Tyler
said
there were fairies in your garden,” she commented.

 

AFTER SARA LEFT with Max, Hadley had walked back into her kitchen, running her fingertips along the countertops and the rounded handle of the old refrigerator, feeling for changes. Because things
had
changed, the air warmer, quieter somehow. She felt stronger than she had in a long time.

She paused in the middle of the kitchen, turning to tell Sean, and then realized what she was doing.

 

 

AFTER THAT, it had been the most natural thing in the world to cross the yard, pick up a baby, stir a pot on the stove. Whatever needed doing.

“You are a lifesaver,” Sara said. “What can I do for you?”

“This,” Hadley answered, and she had bought a small blue wooden step, just high enough that Tyler could reach the latch on her gate.

ABOUT THREE WEEKS AFTER Sara had moved in, a woman had arrived at Hadley’s door, introducing herself as Marion and asking if Hadley wanted to join a baby-holding circle for Sara. Although Hadley had not been excited about the concept of joining anything, a feeling of protectiveness rose up in her—she was hardly going to let Max and Hillary go into hands she didn’t know—and so she agreed. Marion also roped in her younger sister, Daria, a choice that Hadley questioned the first time she met her, but Daria melted into the twins and quickly became a favorite. Marion’s friend Caroline suggested her friend Kate. And there they were—five women, one for each weekday.

Eventually, Hadley had come to know all of them. It was Marion who started the tradition of stopping by Hadley’s after her shift, for a cup of tea if it was morning, or a glass of wine if she had a late afternoon slot. One by one, the other women followed suit until sometimes Hadley wondered, not always gratefully, just whom the circle was holding. But over the months she came to look forward to these visits, the way the edges of the women were softened by their time with the babies, their voices becoming lower and more melodious, words caressing things they loved rather than darting out at the world’s frustrations.

Of course, they all wanted to set her up with someone.

“Hadley, you’re young. You’re gorgeous,” Daria had remarked early one evening. “You should be going out and seeing people. Men.” Daria liked the afternoon shifts with the twins; they allowed her a full day working at her pottery studio and then a chance to unwind with the babies, as she put it, before going out in the evening. Daria said there was no aphrodisiac for men like the look in a woman’s eyes after she had been holding a baby.

“It’s like we’re just radiating pheromones or something,” Daria said. “You should use this to your advantage. Find a guy—at least have sex.”

“I’m fine,” Hadley replied. “I don’t need anyone right now.” Hadley had wondered why it was so important to all of them. Truly, she was so much better than she had been after Sean died. She simply didn’t have an interest in men anymore. It wasn’t that she didn’t like them; she just knew how easily they broke.

 

 

“BUT DON’T YOU WANT this?” Caroline asked one morning, nodding her chin down toward the sleeping baby in her arms. She had come over, bringing little Hillary with her.

“No,” Hadley lied.

 

ONE AFTERNOON, almost a year after the women had started the baby-holding circle, Kate and Hadley had been sitting in Hadley’s kitchen. Hadley was making tea, watching the steam rise, the way the hot water lured clouds of brown tea from the bags. As Hadley poured milk into a small pitcher Kate turned to her.

“I have something to tell you,” she said.

Hadley nodded, concentrating on the milk, the way the white of the liquid met the white of the pitcher, the two so similar and yet if you paid attention you could see the difference. She knew what Kate was going to say; she had seen the change in Kate’s face over the months, the way her eyes had darkened, pulling in her thoughts. You could tell, the same way you could tell if a woman was pregnant. The opposite of glow.

“They think they’ve caught it early,” Kate said. “They say I should be just fine.”

Hadley waited, listening. She remembered the way people used to talk and talk when she told them what had happened to Sean, as if words would somehow fill up the space that suddenly gaped around her. What she had wanted was silence. But now, listening to Kate, it was as if she could hear the brakes screaming, the sound of the impact as fate hit her friend and sent her life flying. No wonder people wanted to talk.

“I knew this would be hard for you; I wanted to tell you myself,” said Kate. She looked outside to the garden, away from Hadley. The kitchen was quiet. “It’s so green,” Kate said, almost to herself.

 

“WE’RE CHANGING THE baby-holding circle,” Marion had told Hadley. “The twins are a year old; Sara’s got it under control. It’s time to take care of Kate.”

Hadley felt her chin pull back, an involuntary movement.

“It’s too soon,” she said. Her voice sounded childlike, even to her, but she didn’t know what else to say.

She had been waiting, the way the books and her mother on the phone and the nurse at the hospital that night had said. They said it would get better, day by day. And it had. Each day was one more stick in the bridge she was making over the crevasse of Sean’s death. One more thing to stand on. But all it took, apparently, was one piece of news, one small sideswipe of someone else’s life and you were standing on the edge again, your stomach already falling.

“I’m not ready,” she said.

Marion nodded. “When do you think you would be?” she asked, her voice calm and nonjudgmental.

Hadley stopped; she couldn’t imagine.

“You know,” Marion said, “I met a woman once when I was a teenager. I knew she had gone through a lot, but she was so strong, so compassionate. I asked her how she could be the way she was, and you know what she told me?”

Hadley shook her head.

“She said, ‘You can be broken, or broken open. That choice is yours.’”

 

AFTER HER TALK with Marion, Hadley had gone to the hardware store and bought a long-handled lopper. When she got home, she chopped a space out of the ivy that surrounded the chair, a rough frame to the chaos around it. Still, it was space. When Kate saw it, she laughed.

“Any port in a storm, Hadley,” she said.

After that, Kate often came to Hadley’s house after her treatments. Kate would fall asleep in the big blue chair in the garden and Hadley would sit and watch the ivy grow around her. And every time after Kate went home, Hadley would cut it back again.

 

FOR EIGHTEEN MONTHS the women had held tight around Kate, as if simply by their existence they could form a boundary that would hold her inside when it seemed everything else was trying to pull her away.

But Kate hadn’t died, had stayed inside the circle, and after the last test results had come back stunningly, miraculously clean, they all had met that September evening for Kate’s victory party. And when Kate had told Hadley that her challenge was to take care of her garden, there wasn’t a single woman at the table who was surprised.

 

IT WAS A MORNING in late March. Hadley stood at her back door, looking out at the green sea that was her backyard. The ivy flowed over shapes that might have once been bushes, swirled up the trunk of the plum tree and along its branches, crept up the walls of the house and edged across the windows. It was easy to be seduced by the lushness of it all, to be overwhelmed by the determination that carried it green and thriving through winter when so many plants cut loose their leaves and sent their roots hustling deeper into the ground at the first sign of cold weather. Hadley had promised Kate that she would take care of her garden, but she had delayed, daunted by the task, watching as the ivy came closer, winding its way along the path and up the porch. As she stood on her back porch, Hadley glanced down to see a tendril casually reaching out for the doorknob.

She walked resolutely into the kitchen and found the gardening gloves Marion had given her. Then she went outside, hearing the screen door close reluctantly behind her.

“Okay,” she said, and put on her gloves.

 

SHE STARTED at the back door, unraveling the serpentine vines that traveled up the porch railings toward the house. The soft green tips came loose easily under her fingers, but it was only a matter of a foot or two before the tendrils hardened, their glossy leaves hiding clusters of threads tenaciously latched onto the wood. Pulling them off left footprints of suckers and brought away chunks of paint.

Well, Hadley thought, I needed to repaint anyway.

And she pulled, dropping the leggy strands into a pile that grew until her only option was to get rid of it. She dragged an old black plastic trashcan from the garage and plunged her hands into the mountain of discarded ivy, shoving in armload after armload. When the can was full, she climbed in, using the railing for support, and stomped down with her feet until there was room for more. When she could cram no further, she gripped the can with both hands and dragged it to the curb out front and returned.

An hour later, Hadley stepped back and looked at the porch. Ripped clean of its vegetative covering, it had a slightly scarred quality, its white paint mottled with bare patches and ivy threads, the area around it bare. But its lines rose clean and straight from the ground, claiming its space. A firm place to stand on, she thought as she looked at it—part inside, part out. She wondered who the architect was who had first understood that basic human need to have a place, a moment, to pause before entering, to shift from the person you were outside to the one you would become when you walked through the door.

She hadn’t gotten that, she thought, looking at the porch—when Sean died, there had just been before the phone call and after. No illness, no aging. Just Sean and then no Sean. No porch to stand on, to get ready to go inside.

I needed a porch, she thought.

She stood hot and dirty in the early spring air, looking out at the garden. Above the tidal wave of green she could just make out the tops of the plum tree branches.

“My yard,” she said, looking at the ivy. “Not yours.”

She took off her sweatshirt, then picked the first vine she could distinguish from the tangle on the ground and yanked; it gave way with a quick snap and a spray of dirt and dust, leaving her holding a piece some five feet long. She’d never win like that, she thought. She chose a new strand and pulled, slowly and steadily this time, drawing it toward her hand over hand, feeling the tension grow as she worked her way down the vine. She closed her eyes and increased the pressure as she felt resistance, feeling only the hard line of energy between them, the rope of the vine through the gloves on her hands. She pulled, hard. Somewhere, deep in the undergrowth, the ivy was giving up, unlatching from the ground at its very source. She was almost there.

There was a crack and she flew backward, landing hard on her tailbone. She swore loudly, not caring who heard her. It felt good. She opened her eyes, stood up and grabbed another vine and then another and another. The muscles in her arms and legs grew warm as she worked; her mouth became gritty from the dust and dirt that flew through the air. She worked, not thinking, time measured in huge paper yard bags—one, two, three, four.

After hauling the fourth bag to the front curb, she took a break. She was hungry, her body demanding food. She made a sandwich and brought her plate outside, sitting on the porch steps in the cool air, taking huge, gratifying bites of turkey and bread, sweating slightly and looking out proudly over her progress. She could do this, she thought. It wasn’t such a big deal.

The sun had changed position as she worked and was shining down through the leaves in the back of her yard. She had always wondered what kind of trees lined the fence—their trunks were hardy, the branches thick as her arm. The ivy didn’t stand a chance against them, and the thought had always brought her hope. She had looked forward to clearing the space around the trees, giving them more room to grow. Now, between the sun and her efforts, she could truly make them out for the first time. Her gaze idly followed the patterns of vines climbing up them.

No, not up them, she realized with a start—from them. The trees
were
ivy.

“Oh no.” The words came out of Hadley’s mouth, small and quiet. She stood up, her hands shaking, took the sandwich to the kitchen and placed it carefully on the counter. Then she walked to the bathroom, stripped off her clothes and got into her tiny shower. She sat on the floor, her back against the cold tile wall, her face in her hands, feeling the water falling over her head.

 

HADLEY WOKE UP the next morning to the sound of voices in her yard. Her head ached and her eyes still felt swollen. What time was it? She reached over to check the clock, feeling the creak and growl of her muscles, the blood still heavy in her head. Nine A.M. Who was in her yard? Maybe the ivy had really taken over, grown legs and voices and was coming for her house. It didn’t seem impossible.